1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method of manufacturing gel particles and a drive signal generation device for a liquid ejection head.
2. Related Art
There is known a method of manufacturing gel particles by ejecting a liquid toward an ejection target liquid. Further, there has been considered drug delivery for making the gel particles manufactured by such a method as described above include a medicine, and then injecting the gel particles into a blood vessel, thereby making the medicine reach an affected area in the body. In view of the injection into the body, it is preferable to manufacture smaller gel particles. Therefore, it is required to make it possible to manufacture the gel particles by ejecting smaller droplets of the liquid from a liquid ejection head.
It should be noted that although the description of “gel” is used in the present specification for the sake of convenience of explanation, the invention relates to a technology of making microscopic capsules such as “microspheres,” “microcapsules,” or “gel beads.”
JP-A-2000-218778 discloses that in order for ejecting small droplets of a liquid the variation time of a first voltage variation process for reducing the volume of a pressure generation chamber and the variation time of a second voltage variation process for increasing the volume of the pressure generation chamber in the driving waveform are set to equal to or shorter than the natural period (the natural period of an actuator) of the natural vibration of an electromechanical transducer to thereby achieve the miniaturization.
However, as described above, there has been a problem that it is difficult to eject the droplets of the liquid including a polymeric material in a miniaturized manner even if the variation time of the processes is set to be equal to or shorter than the natural period of the actuator as described above.